In recent years, many medical institutions offer an NK therapy and a monocyte-derived dendritic cell therapy, each of which is an immune cell therapy. A dendritic cell therapy which uses acquired immunity and an NK therapy which uses natural immunity are frequently applied as a combined therapy due to their advantages.
In the case of the combined therapy, dendritic cells and NK cells are obtained from independent blood so far. Components of monocytes to be differentiated into dendritic cells later are collected by apheresis (collection of blood components). Meanwhile, NK cells are collected from peripheral blood and grown. Therefore, the combined therapy generally requires two times of blood collection.